When I first heard the term Big Data a few years ago, I didn’t think much of it. Soon after, Big Data started appearing in many of my conversations with many of my tech friends. So I started asking a very simple question ‘What is Big Data?’. I kept asking that question to various folks and I did not get the same answer twice from any number of people. ‘Oh, it’s a lot of data’. ‘It’s variety of data’. ‘It’s how fast the data is piling up’. Really? I thought to myself but was afraid to ask more questions. As none of it made much sense to me, I decided to dig into it myself. Obviously, my first stop was Google.

When I typed ‘Big Data’ at that time, this showed up.

Ahh, It all made sense right away. None of the people I was talking to really knew much about Big Data but were talking about it anyway as everyone else was talking about it.

In this series of articles, I am planning to write on Big Data, my target audience is those people who come across the term Big Data but don’t live and breathe Big Data on a daily basis for their regular jobs. …